I missed a lot of the news this weekend and turned it on this morning to them discussing him trying to keep his job. I jump here thinking there would be a thread on this but don't see anything.
I don't know exactly what happened so I'm not going to make any comment.
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"What do you mean I ain't kind? Just not your kind."
Michael Steele played into the hands of the liberal Democrats. Michael Steele also pretty much told it like it is. The war in Afghanistan will not be "won". The best that will happen there is an unholy compromise that has Karzai and the Taliban "sharing" power. This is what the US hating Karzai wants and he will get his way; at least until the Taliban drags his butt through the streets of Kabul behind a pickup truck.
Karzai badmouths US troops every time an Afghan non-combatant is killed by "friendly" fire. From Karzai's sorry rhetoric one would be lead to believe that the US has killed hundreds of thousands of Afghan non-combatants-wrong. Since 2001 there have been 4,000 Afghan non-combatants killed as a direct result of war. In the decade of the 90s; 400,000 Afghans died as the country tore itself apart.
I don't know the particulars and am going to stay largely out of the discussion. If Michael Steele advanced a policy position not supported generally by the Republican Party, he is in deep do-do. He is not a policy maker. He is not an elected official. He is a spokesperson. That means he speaks for others -- not for himself.
Speaking for myself -- and not as a representative of the Republican Party or any other party -- I think Afghanistan is a lost cause. Personally, I don't see any point in pouring more treasure into and sacrificing more American troops' lives for what is obviously a lost cause. I'm not the only one who sees it this way. George Will, noted conservative columnist who came to prominence early in the Regan years, has written a column essentially maintaining this position.
Personally, I'm not sure that Michael Steele is far wrong when he says the war in Afghanistan cannot be won. Unless we're willing to change our tactics (we're not) and unless the American people a.) have the stomach for doing what it takes to win a war of this nature (they don't) and b.) are willing to piss off a few of our allies by doing what it would take to win the war (they aren't), Afghanistan is a dead-end road. We'll continue to pump billions of dollars into the war and sacrifice the lives of American servicemen and women without any concrete gains in securing democracy in Afghanistan...let alone gains in the war on terror or snuffing out the Taliban.
But for a man of his position, Steele's opinion is poorly conceived and poorly delivered. As Alsatian says, he is a spokesperson for the Republican Party. And the Republican Party, by and large, maintains its support for this war. And to say that Afghanistan is a "war of Obama's choosing" is purely ignorant.
This all goes back to a much broader situation. As I've said before, the GOP's choosing of Steele (and sticking by him) proves that the party is not prepared for a serious return to power. Steele is opposed to all the platforms that rake hard-line conservatives into the Republican Party. The epic failures of 2006 and 2008 were largely because conservatives were dropping from the party like flies due to the party losing its identity by taking the very same unconservative stances that Steele endorses.
The GOP's selection of Steele as chairman was so juvenile and short-sighted that it boggles the mind. They had a deer-in-the-headlights look when a black man won the presidency with a wave of support and rushed to appoint their own token black man so they could attempt to herd the minority voters...an effort that is going to prove forever frugile because the Republicans are ignoring the very reason minorities vote Democrat in the first place. It has nothing to do with the race of the party's leaders; blacks might have voted Democrat in '08 by a slightly larger margin than before, but that margin was already overwhelming and contrary to expectation they didn't really turn out in greater numbers than in previous years. It has everything to do with a fundamental platform...a platform that the Republican Party isn't going to change and shouldn't change.
The GOP had a solid chairman in Mike Duncan. He didn't exactly inspire, but he could've helped the party weather the storm much better than Steele. If the Republicans had truly realized the error of their ways in 2008, they would've gone out and appointed a staunch, charismatic conservative as chairman in an effort to draw the conservatives back in rather than appointing a black man in an unveiled attempt to draw minorities in.
The end result is the Republicans are sitting here in the midst of a campaign season that should lead to one of their biggest single-cycle gains in Congress in quite a few years and instead they're bickering amongst themselves about their chairman. The GOP will make gains in November; there's no doubt about that. But the gains won't be as great as they would've been if the right person had been picked to lead the party.
And now they've got themselves a little bit of a quandry. Fire Steele and you've given the news media and the liberals (sorry for the redundancy) fodder for their "Republicans are racist" mantra.
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Politics, it seems to me, all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong. ~Richard Armour
The bigger issue is that, right or wrong, he's kind of a 'wash' for the RNC. He needs to raise funds for the election of republicans, not cause controversy in the national media.
He's a flat tire....
I missed a lot of the news this weekend and turned it on this morning to them discussing him trying to keep his job. I jump here thinking there would be a thread on this but don't see anything.
I don't know exactly what happened so I'm not going to make any comment.
No thread on Michael Steele?
